How much does a Will cost in the UK?

You'll generally come across three types of provider:

• Online or DIY Wills, £0 to £120. These may suit a very simple situation, but you will not usually have someone checking that the wording and signing match what you intended.
• Will writers and private-client practices, £150 to £700. You get a properly drafted will after a real conversation about your circumstances, usually for a fixed fee.
• High-street and City solicitors, £400 to £1,500+. Often charged by the hour, and the higher fees usually reflect tax planning work rather than the Will itself.

These are our fees. They are fixed and agreed before work begins, so you can make your decision without worrying about a running hourly bill.

Full price list

Price comes down to how complicated your affairs are, not how long the document is. The usual reasons a Will costs more are:

• More than one property, or land and buildings abroad.
• Owning a business, shares, or agricultural property.
• An estate worth over roughly £1.5 million, where inheritance tax planning matters.
• Seven or more beneficiaries, or gifts that need careful wording.
• A trust, for example a property protection trust or a discretionary trust, a flexible trust, or a trust for a vulnerable or disabled beneficiary.
• Second marriages and blended families, where you need to protect children from an earlier relationship.

You can't make a joint Will in England and Wales, so each person needs their own. But where a couple's Wills say much the same thing, most of the drafting is shared, so we charge a lower rate for the pair. If the two Wills say quite different things, they're treated as two separate pieces of work and priced that way.

• LPA registration. The Office of the Public Guardian charges its own registration fee for each LPA, on top of any drafting fee. Check the current figure on GOV.UK.
• Severing a joint tenancy. If you want to leave your share of a property to someone other than the co-owner, the ownership has to be split first, and that costs £75.
• Storage and updates. Ask whether storing your Will is included, and how much a later change will cost.
• Probate later on. A cheap Will that's badly worded can end up costing your family far more in sorting out the estate than it ever saved you.

It can be. A DIY Will that is completed and signed correctly can be perfectly valid. The difficulty is knowing what the form has not asked. It may not tell you that your house passes outside the Will automatically, that your ex-partner is still down as a beneficiary on your pension, or that leaving everything to a child under 18 creates a trust you never meant to set up. Those problems tend to surface at probate, when it's too late to put them right.